A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI: Egghead At the Plate

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Not all this ink can be blamed on Pete Rose or balk rules. Giamatti is too articulate for his own anonymity. Sportswriters have learned that Bart, as everyone calls him, will eventually deliver the colorful remark. It may take some hounding. He may try to put them off with a "Can't talk to you now, guy" or a "Later, pal," displaying the side-of-the-mouth brusqueness he adopts when feeling besieged. Never mind. Sooner or later, usually sooner, he will relent. Prod him with questions. Why has he been critical of those huge screens towering behind outfield fences in so many parks that now sometimes compete with the game in progress? "Look," he will answer in spite of himself, "I'm not some kind of Luddite, baying at change." And then he is off and running. "The screen is the most visible symbol of our high-tech age, and here it is, plunked down in this ancient coliseum. It's only been around for ten years or so. We need to determine its proper venue."

Reporters have not as a rule approached other sports executives in pursuit of profundities. Former Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, for example, was seldom sounded for his views on Western civilization. What sets Giamatti apart from everyone else who has held a comparable position of authority in U.S. sports is his background. He once made his living as a professor of English and comparative literature, with a particular interest in the Italian Renaissance. Odder still, he was at age 40 the youngest person in 200 years to be installed as the president of Yale University, in 1978. (Around the time of his selection, Giamatti made a wry, self-deprecatory remark that seems, in retrospect, premonitory, if slightly off base: "The only thing I ever want to be president of is the American League.")

Giamatti knows that his eight years as head of one of the nation's great universities will affect how he is perceived now and for the rest of his career. He is permanently stamped as the egghead who invaded baseball. "I'm not ashamed of what I did at Yale," he says. "I love the place, I was extremely happy there, and I was thrilled to have some control over its continuing excellence and well-being." Still, if stories about him must be written, he would like to see a few that do not harp on his exotic past, drop names such as Dante or Machiavelli or refer to him as the Renaissance man. "I $ suppose where I came from can't be ignored," he admits. "But I am less struck by the anomaly of moving from there to here than others seem to be."

That perceived peculiarity is double-edged. On the one hand, some Yale alums still cluck over the spectacle of Giamatti's descent from academic grandeur to the commercial muck of professional sports. If there is a life for former Ivy League presidents, it should be conducted as unobtrusively as possible in a reputable embassy or blue-chip foundation. At the other extreme, certain tobacco-chewing, spit-on-the-hands, belly-up-to-the-bar baseball types wonder what in the hell a gabby professor is doing running a league and, next year, the whole show. Oh, yeah, Giamatti. Whattid he ever hit?